American Thought Leaders

Latest Episodes:

Future of European Security and Russia-Ukraine Peace Efforts: Latvia Foreign Minister Baiba Braze Dec 11, 2025

Show notes

Amidst ongoing U.S. efforts to mediate a Russia–Ukraine peace and the release of a new U.S. national security strategy that has sent shockwaves through Europe, I’m sitting down with the foreign minister of Latvia, Baiba Braze, to get her unique perspective.

Latvia is a small Baltic country bordering Estonia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia. In the 1940s, the Soviets occupied Latvia and its neighboring countries—a reality that has made Latvia hyper-vigilant against potential Russian expansionism.

Latvia joined both the EU and NATO in 2004, alongside Lithuania and Estonia.

Latvia is one of the few NATO countries that spends considerably more than 2 percent of its GDP per year on its military.

“We keep reminding [other NATO countries] that it’s possible to do that, and we are showing you as our example. In our case, it’s 5 percent hard defense capabilities,” Braze said.

Latvia is working to reallocate state funding to hit a target of 4.91 percent of GDP in defense spending by 2026 and 5 percent in subsequent years.

In our wide-ranging interview, Braze discusses the Ukraine war, how she sees a potential peace agreement taking shape, and how pressure can be mounted on Russia. She’s traveled four times to Ukraine in the 18 months since her appointment as Latvia’s minister of foreign affairs.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Former CDC Director Calls for Removal of mRNA Vaccines for COVID-19 | Dr. Robert Redfield Dec 09, 2025

Show notes

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says he’d like to see the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines phased out and eventually removed from the market.

Redfield led the CDC from 2018 to 2021. While an avid proponent of vaccines in general, he hopes that the fallout from the emergency-authorized mRNA vaccines will lead to a broader recognition that vaccine manufacturers must no longer be exempt from liability.

Redfield is a clinical virologist who, prior to his appointment as CDC director in 2018, spent decades in HIV/AIDS research and clinical care, including service in the U.S. Army Medical Corps and later at the University of Maryland, where he co-founded the Institute of Human Virology.

Over the past few years, he’s been at the forefront of treating patients who were injured by the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

In my interview with him, we covered at length the many hot topics and questions surrounding the recent pandemic and our pandemic response, among them:

How and why was the true origin of SARS-COV-2 suppressed? What indicators were there early on that the virus was likely leaked from a lab? What did Dr. Redfield know from classified documents at the beginning of 2020?

What were the most significant missteps America made in its response to the pandemic?

Is there a role for gain-of-function research in America? Or should it be outlawed?

What is the future of mRNA technology? Should mRNA technology be used for vaccines at all?

Why weren’t the vaccine-injured publicly acknowledged and adequately cared for?

What kinds of reforms are needed in America’s public health system?

Redfield’s new book is titled “Redfield’s Warning: What I Learned (but Couldn’t Tell You) Might Save Your Life.”

He argues a lab-created bird flu may be the next pandemic. But are we prepared?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Robert Kiyosaki: Why America’s Middle Class Keeps Getting Poorer Dec 06, 2025

Show notes

“I’ve been fighting communism by teaching capitalism,” says Robert Kiyosaki, holding up a copy of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” and a copy of his book “The Capitalist Manifesto.”

Robert Kiyosaki became famous as the author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” a book that has sold 48 million copies worldwide since its 1997 publication.

Kiyosaki maintains that in today’s America, plagued by high inflation and a crumbling dollar, rich dads are getting ever richer while poor dads are getting poorer:

“Food gets up in price, but the poor and middle class have to pay for it. So my apartment houses go up, but the poor middle class go homeless. And that’s the seed of communism, that’s the seed of revolt,” he says.

In this episode, we dive into what he sees as the roots of America’s economic woes and what young people can do in today’s economy to build wealth and prosperity.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Does the Soul Exist Outside the Brain? Insights from a Neurosurgeon | Dr. Michael Egnor Dec 04, 2025

Show notes

“Neuroscientists who stand up and say ‘we have souls’ are few and far between,” says pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor.

“But when you look carefully at the neuroscience—the best neuroscience over the past century—it clearly points to the existence of the soul and to the existence of aspects of our mind that don’t come from the brain.”

Egnor himself started off as a materialist and atheist. But 40 years and more than 7,000 brain surgeries later, he concluded that reason and free will do not reside in the brain. In this episode, he reveals what he’s found.

“Neuroscience is just fundamentally wrong in a lot of ways … because of the materialist bias in neuroscience. We can’t get away from this machine analogy, [but] we’re not machines, and we don’t work like machines work. And there’s overwhelming evidence in neuroscience for the existence of a soul,” he says.

Dr. Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at Stony Brook University, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and the co-author of the book “The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

From Statins to Paxil, Here’s What’s Wrong With a Lot of Medical Research | Maryanne Demasi Dec 02, 2025

Show notes

Maryanne Demasi is an independent investigative journalist based in Australia and a former medical scientist with a PhD in rheumatology from the University of Adelaide.

For many years, she worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and gained wide attention for reporting on controversial medical topics, particularly the efficacy and safety of statins and psychiatric drugs.

Demasi was eventually suspended from her position at ABC in 2016 following controversies over her comprehensive and critical examination of statin drugs and other health risks. After leaving ABC, she continued her career as an independent investigative medical journalist.

In this interview, we discuss how science can be weaponized and drug data manipulated or suppressed, even for many common drugs prescribed to millions of Americans.

“Psychiatry is a classic example of where pharmaceutical companies have been sponsoring their own trials and burying data and then putting a spin on the medical journal, saying that the drug is safe and effective when the fact is, it’s not,” she says.

“This is not an exception. This happens commonly. Throughout history, pharmaceutical companies have been sued for designing trials [and] hiding, burying data.”

Demasi said she has been censored during her career as a journalist and understands the censorship and the pressures faced by journalists and medical professionals who challenge the data and narratives of the powerful pharmaceutical industry.

“COVID was the unmasking of how all of this censorship came about,” she said. “It really was an event that woke people up to just how corrupt the system is at every level, from the media to the academia to the agencies that are meant to protect us to the medical journals.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Exclusive: Kash Patel Talks China Fentanyl, Violent Networks, ‘Burn Bags,’ and More Nov 29, 2025

Show notes

In this exclusive interview with FBI Director Kash Patel, we dive into the agency’s crackdown on crime and foreign espionage, his trip to China, the “burn bags,” and recent criticisms.

What exactly is the “764 network,” and how is the FBI working to target these actors? Why did President Donald Trump label Antifa a domestic terror organization, and how does this alter the playing field?

Does the FBI director’s recent visit to China signify a pivot in the agency’s priorities? Given Beijing’s record of broken promises, can we really expect the regime to honor its side of the fentanyl deal?

The criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey was dismissed—what’s next? What are the FBI “burn bags,” and what was really discovered in those Trump investigation documents?

Patel also reacts to recent headlines and controversies regarding his use of an FBI aircraft, the security detail for his partner, Alexis Wilkins, and rumors that Trump planned to replace him as FBI director.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Why These 9 Institutions Must Be Reformed Post-COVID | Jeffrey Tucker Nov 25, 2025

Show notes

For many Americans, the COVID-19 era revealed profound ruptures in American society. While some are eager to move on from that period and simply return to “normal,” there are others who wonder: Is it really that simple?

How can we move forward without truly reconciling with the profound brokenness that was revealed in the last five years? How can we simply ignore or forget those who were censored, deplatformed, surveilled, fired, socially exiled, or irrevocably injured? And if a new virus were to spread in America, can we really say that the same things wouldn’t happen all over again?

At the center of the people asking these questions is the Brownstone Institute, founded by Jeffrey Tucker, senior economics columnist at The Epoch Times. Brownstone has become a safe haven for free thinkers to deliberate on some of the most profound questions of our time.

“We’re really at this precipice. We don’t know which way we’re going to go,” Tucker says.

In this episode, he breaks down nine key foundational institutions of American life that he believes are in desperate need of reform.

“We need a different system, a renewed and refreshed system of ideas production and teaching production in this country, with new independent institutions that are willing to stand up and do the right thing, [that] embrace classical forms of teaching and have a broad-minded approach to academia,” Tucker says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

How a Little Known Technology Can Break China’s Rare Earths Stranglehold | Dr. James Tour Nov 22, 2025

Show notes

In a few years, America may not need to buy critical minerals from China anymore, says synthetic chemist and nanotechnologist James Tour.

Why? Because of a method called flash Joule heating that he and his team have been studying at Rice University.

China currently has a near-monopoly on global processing capacity for critical minerals, including rare earths. These are essential to much of our modern economy, from electronics to defense to medical devices.

The United States has access to plenty of rare-earth reserves, but minimal capacity to process and refine them. Rebuilding these incredibly complex supply chains independent of China is a major uphill battle.

But Tour and his team have pioneered a process that allows for the quick extraction of rare earths from something we have in abundance: electronic and industrial waste.

“We realized that we could take certain materials, say industrial waste like fly ash … flash it, and get rare-earth elements to come out,” Tour says.

The same method can be used to extract rare earths from mine tailings—the leftover, toxic material from old mines that were once too expensive to process.

“So there’s huge availability of this. And if you recycle it—metals are infinitely recyclable,” Tour says.

Tour is a professor of chemistry, materials science, and nanoengineering at Rice University. You can find him on X and other platforms: @drjamestour

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

How Your Private Data Is Packaged, Sold, and Deployed to Target You | Joe Weil Nov 20, 2025

Show notes

Most Americans have little understanding of the vast amount of private data harvested from their smartphones by third parties, said Joe Weil, a former Apple product manager and the founder of Unplugged.

Where you go, who you associate with, what you like, is all easily discoverable, Weil said.

“It’s publicly available. It’s purchasable.”

What’s even worse is that the Fourth Amendment does not protect this advertising data, he said. The U.S. government, for example, does not require a warrant to access it.

Data brokers sell this data freely, and by applying just a few filters, anyone—foreign governments, intelligence services, criminal cartels—can easily triangulate it to surveil and target individual people or groups, Weil said.

“We can’t do [surveillance] in China. They can do it here, and it’s a huge vulnerability. They can easily find the people they want to take off the board—it’s mapped out from our phones,” he said.

Weil worked for 10 years at Apple in product strategy before founding Unplugged, a tech company that has built a smartphone designed to block tracking, data harvesting, and behavioral profiling at the system level.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

From Gene-Edited Babies to ‘Bodyoids,’ the Brave New World of Modern Medicine | Dr. Aaron Kheriaty Nov 18, 2025

Show notes

Modern medicine is veering away from the traditional Hippocratic Oath that required physicians to do no harm and use their knowledge and skills solely for the purpose of healing the patient, says psychiatrist and bioethics expert Dr. Aaron Kheriaty.

Now, physicians are euthanizing patients, removing healthy organs in certain transgender-related surgeries, and injecting drugs for late-term abortions even when the mother’s life is not threatened.

Hippocratic principles are being superseded by utilitarian ethics that prioritize the “greater good” over the well-being and rights of individual patients, Kheriaty says. That’s fueling, for instance, the push to expand the dead-donor eligibility criteria for organ donations.

It’s also manifesting in the push to adopt technological advancements like germ-line gene editing that could be used to create “designer babies” or in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), a process that uses stem cells, such as those derived from skin cells, to create human eggs and sperm in a lab.

Earlier this year, an op-ed in the MIT Technology Review argued for the creation of “spare” human bodies called “bodyoids.” These would essentially be human bodies created in laboratories from human stem cells, but without brains or consciousness. Proponents say they would revolutionize medical research and drug testing and create an unlimited supply of organs.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction. What are the true ethical implications? Is this really where we want medicine to go?

Kheriaty is the director of the bioethics and American democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former director of the medical ethics program at UCI Health.

His latest book is titled “Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine.”

“The biggest advance [that] medicine needs to make is to accept the limits of medicine,” he says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.